Music maven 2007-12-13
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Normally, I would be outraged to buy a CD and find that it's only 31 minutes long. It would be like buying an LP with sound on only one side. But in this case, I don't give the length a second thought. Each individual song here is richer than any full hour-long CD by most bands, and at the end of 31 minutes your head is reeling with how far you've come.
The remarkable thing is how nothing in any song goes where you expect it to go. The melodies flow along for a time and then go skittering off down some alley, only to dart into a doorway you didn't realize was there, and the song structures are just as unpredictable, shifting tempo, harmonic framework, and feel three or four times within a 3-minute song (trust me, there's no way the 30-second clips here can even begin to suggest what's going on with these songs). Yet you never get the sense that these guys are doing it to show off how tricky they can be; there's not a nerdy atom in the recording. It's more like they're simply following the song where it wants to go. And when you hear them do it, you realize how virtually every other band around is, to one degree or another, taking the song where they think you want it to go, or where they think tradition or image or the market wants it to go. Even bands that aim at breaking new ground aim at it. These guys break new ground by getting out of the way--they hatch the song and then let it discover the world on its own. But they never put a foot wrong. Even as each moment on the CD seems spontaneously discovered, each note seems to have been carefully considered and specifically chosen for maximum impact. I know that sounds contradictory, and ordinarily the two ideas are mutually exclusive, but somehow Field Music manages to pull it off, and that's a large part of the fascination in this recording. It's like watching a fire in the fireplace--always shifting yet always coherent.
These guys don't seem to be beholden to anyone. A comparison with XTC seems appropriate, but only because they share a fresh sensibility toward pop music (and XTC is much more deliberate in their explorations), and they remind me of NRBQ in their carelessness about convention and spontaneity (although without the deliberate anarchy), but Field Music isn't trying to sound like anyone. It is enormously encouraging to find that in this age when the music business is like factory farming something this original can still sprout. If you have even a slight affection for pop music, buy this CD.
